Just received an email from my MVP Lead - Anka with a message “Did you see this?” and a link to GotDotNet site.

What I’ve seen there is interesting to me… GotDotNet is shutting down, and it’s projects are being reallocated to other Microsoft community sites.

On the site there, there is a more detailed plan how this will be done. Enough to say that if you are watching over some of the projects there and not visiting the home page of the site (like me :().


If you are asking yourself why am I mentioning this… simply said, it would be nice not to loose track of some of the nice projects which are there once they are moved, and if you are like me (didn’t see it), it will be of some significance to you.


Cheers!

One interesting thing. I had many mails and forum posts in relation with my Ajax & DNN integration project.

Till recently all these mails and support were one way, until Mr. Ed Vinyard contacted me.

His first email had this:

…So far, I have only had success with ASP.NET AJAX partial updates by disabling whitespace compression in Compression.config. How did you get AJAX to work without altering this setting? I believe I’ve following your instructions very carefully — but I could be wrong.

It appears that the whitespace compression alters the content length in each update panel section, throwing off the content length counts, and making the response unusable. This results in the infamous
“Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerParserErrorException: The message received from the server could not be parsed…”…

I had the same problem for a while, but just didn’t get around to dig into it a little deeper.

So after a conversation with Ed, he had sent an email with the solution for the compression problem he found. It goes like this:

…Since I first wrote you, we’ve found an alternate workaround for this.

Compression and the whitespace filter can remain enabled if you exclude the “text/plain” response MIME type from compression. This works because the response type for partial updates is “text/plain”.

I say “alternate” because it may be worse than disabling the whitespace filter — maybe much worse in a heavily AJAX-ified site. We haven’t made any comparative measurements of response sizes.

For the time being, we’ll be disabling whitespace filtering for production use. We might be digging around in the HttpCompress code soon, though.

Again, thank you for the article. It would’ve taken me much longer to get ASP.NET AJAX code working on DNN without it….


You might be asking yourself why I am so glad, and am posting this in this manner?

There are 2 great reasons:

1) I am really happy someone else digged into this and found at least a partial solution
2) It sounds VERY nice to get some ideas back from people who are using something you’ve released

So thank you Ed.

So if you have compression problems with DNN, this should help you a bit.


Cheers!

While trying out the Guidance Automation Toolkit and especially the great Software Factories Toolkit, I’ve also installed the new version of Visual Studio 2005 SDK.

I was very pleasently surprised to find that it has such a great set of tutorials and code samples, even available through a tool like this:

I am not sure if these existed in versions prior to this one (haven’t “bumped” into them), but what I see here I really like and it helps me so much in adopting some of the technical aspects of VS Extensibility.

If you are interested in expanding on the features or Visual Studio, this is definetly a material worth taking a while to peak at.

You can download it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=51a5c65b-c020-4e08-8ac0-3eb9c06996f4&DisplayLang=en

Or read about the updates in the latest release here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/garethj/archive/2007/03/02/visual-studio-sdk-v4-and-dsl-tools-update-is-released.aspx

Cheers!

So last week I went to Seattle to join a group of 1700 people on the Global MVP Summit.

For first impressions all I can say is… GREAT… the town is great, I’ve seen bits of Microsoft, talked to some products teams on their development cycles, heared allot of great new info (unfortuantly most of it is under NDA).

A side from technical sessions, Microsoft also organized some great dinners, one of the most interesting ones being at the Seattle Airplane museum (I have about 100 pictures from museum alone :)), and we’ve also been creative ourselves, visiting various breweries, pubs and other places trying all kinds of home made and imported bears


One part of the conference I’ve really liked… I’ve been able to meet up with the DotNetNuke team, first at their offices and a day later at the museum and had a chance to both grab some bears, and to talk about the current gray areas of DNN, as well as future developments to ensure some of the grey areas become white.


As I know a picture speaks a thousand words… here is a little photo story from that part of the my DNN @ Summit experience

1) Meeting in the DNN offices - What can I say, the DotNetNuke team, a few MVP’s and a 2 and a half hours of talking:

2) Met them while strawling around the airplane museum - Again, no comments are needed, a little bit less of technical talking, a few bears more… but still allot of fun

All in all, we have an interesting year ahead of us in the DNN community, the team has accepted all the comments and gave us some insights into some of the great solutions we can expect in the coming year which will help us keep our users even more happy with the framework.


One more thing… Cheers to Cathal Connolly… one of the greatest guys I’ve met on the summit, fun when drinking with (a real Irish fellow :)) and serious when talking about DNN, Security or other tech topics!